Critics Blast UN for Ignoring Longstanding Ties Between UNRWA and Hamas

Critics criticize UN for overlooking longstanding connections between UNRWA and Hamas

February 9, 2024 TruthUSA

That the United Nations fired a dozen employees of its Palestine relief agency for involvement in Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre seems underwhelming to scholars and policy experts on the issue.

They see it as a long time coming on a far deeper problem the U.N. consistently has refused to face, and use terms like “damage control” and “sweeping it under the carpet” to describe what’s happening.

“It’s wonderful to see people finally waking up to this fact,” said Simone Ledeen, a high-ranking Defense Department official during the Trump administration.

“They’re waking up to this fact, but also, my understanding is they were faced with undeniable proof. We already had proof, proof that existed prior to Oct. 7.”

The agency—the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, or UNRWA—has long been accused of having extensive involvement with Hamas, which has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007.

The U.S. government has classified Hamas as a terrorist group since 1997.

After Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, UNRWA is the Gaza Strip’s largest employer. Nearly all its employees are Palestinians, unique among U.N. relief agencies.

The agency, for almost 75 years, has made no effort to resettle Palestinians, instead keeping alive the increasingly unlikely hope that they will one day return to what is now the Jewish state of Israel.

UNRWA’s defenders say not resettling them is explicit in the agency’s charter.

Hamas has long used UNRWA schools, hospitals, and other buildings as human shields, a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention and sanctionable by a U.S. president under the 2018 Shields Act.

A man drives a damaged truck into an United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) school in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip on Oct. 21, 2023. (Mahmud Hams/AFP via Getty Images)

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